262 DR. HOOKER’S MISSION TO INDIA. 
Arabs, who scampered up to us and led us to the brink of the 
pools. There two of them lifted me off the donkey, and forth- 
with making a Queen’s chair, transported me half across, landing 
me in some rich mud, covered with Maize stalks. Thus we were 
all conveyed, riding at times, then splashing through the wet, and 
again carried by two naked and evil-smelling Arabs, till we arrived 
at some hard soil, a mixture of mud and sand, on the edge of the 
Desert. An abrupt cliff of limestone and sand rises immediately 
above the half-inundated tract I have described, and upon it are - 
placed the two grand and several lesser Pyramids, the Sphynx 
below them on the slope of the sand-hills, and the mouths of the 
Catacombs on the cliff: a strange assemblage of objects bearing 
no obvious relation to each other. From here, the Pyramids 
looked vast indeed; but, as we approached still nearer, owing 
to the fore-shortening of their sloping faces, they rapidly de- 
creased to appearance, till when standing under their bases, it 
required both study and consideration to appreciate their gigantic 
dimensions. The perspective of each face is so rapid, that you 
. would positively think a few strides are all that lie between the 
bottom and the top. 
As to the Sphynx, it is truly stupendous, and looks larger and 
larger as you approach; no doubt, because it is an object directly 
comparable with that ever-present standard, —one's self. Of merit 
of execution it has none: grandeur, beauty, placidity, and dig- 
nity, are alike wanting; there is not a worse and more ineffective 
piece of workmanship in St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey. Like 
the Pyramids, it is wonderful and suggestive to an educated indi- 
vidual, but nothing more. The poor face is terribly knocked to 
pieces, and as it can never have had any loveliness to spare, yo" 
may guess how flat and unengaging an object it is, buried up to 
the throat in sand and rubbish, and looking as unable to help 
itself, as it really is. One likes to relieve a noble piece of art, but 
it is impossible to pity the Sphynx. CCS E 
The bases of the Pyramids are covered deeply with rubbish; $0 — 
that the rock on and with which they are built, and which forms —— 
a core, eight feet high, in the centre of the largest, is nowhere E. 
